NEGRO MUSIC American Negro music consists almost entirely of folk-music, the proportion of it written by individual composers being com paratively small. This music is of many kinds but it may be divided into two general classifications, sacred and secular. The sacred music consists of the well known Spirituals, while the secular is work, play and love songs, the blues and dance music— ragtime and jazz. The great bulk consists of songs ; ragtime and jazz, however, are instrumental as well as vocal.
The Spirituals rank first in value and beauty. They, indeed, constitute one of the finest bodies of folk songs in the world. Just how far hack the making of Spirituals by the Negro in America goes cannot be exactly determined, but it is safe to say more than 150 years. It is probable that he began creating these songs shortly after his adoption of Christianity, which came quite early, and along with the establishment of his own separate places of wor ship.
The Spirituals are primarily a fusion of African music and Christian sentiments. They possess the fundamental . character istics of African music ; they have the same strong rhythmic qual ity and show a marked similarity to African songs in verse forms and intervalic structure. However, the Spirituals, upon the base of the primitive rhythms, rise a step beyond African music through a higher melodic and an added harmonic development. The Spir ituals remain distinctive Negro folk-songs.
The texts of the Spirituals are based almost exclusively upon the Bible. The stories in the Bible gave the Negro bards great scope for the play of their imagination and are often told dra matically and in vivid and gorgeously coloured pictures.
It is probable that many of these songs are irretrievably lost, for no systematic effort to record them was made before the Civil War. They were first introduced to the public of America and Europe in 1871 by the Fisk Jubilee singers. They have recently been given a new vogue through the singing of them by Roland Hayes, Paul Robeson, J. Rosamond Johnson, Taylor Gordon and other Negro singers on the concert stage.
Negro secular music, unlike the Spirituals, has gone through many changes and developments. Most of the various styles of Negro secular music have successively been taken over, adapted and made national. And so it appears that as one style of the
Negro's secular music became lost to him he set about creating another. Before and for a while after the Civil War the Negro made many dlantation songs both of the ballad and the patter type. The plantation songs became the mainstay of the black-face minstrel stage ; they were adapted and imitated and remained popular for several decades.
In the last decade of the past century ragtime, a highly synco pated form of music, came into notice. It is fundamentally an instrumental form, and was the result of experiments by Negro players on the piano--then a new instrument to them. Words were adapted to these syncopated rhythms and gave birth to the rag time song, which achieved great popularity in the first decade or so of the present century. The Negro dialect text of the ragtime song was ultimately discarded for straight English, and this form of Negro music took on a national character, and so remains.
About 1910 a distinctly new type, the blues, was invented in the South and rapidly spread over the country. They are as truly folk-songs as the Spirituals ; basic differences being that they are an expression of the individual and not of the group, and that they follow a rigid verse form and are less varied and rich than the Spirituals. This "blue" note has become one of the main elements of American popular music and has been experimented with by serious composers. (See BLUES.) Jazz (q.v.) is somewhat a combination and culmination of ragtime and the blues.
Another class of Negro folk-songs are the work-songs. These were originated by gangs of men at work which permitted of or called for rhythmic motions performed in unison ; the picks or the hammers rising, falling and resting in perfect rhythm with the music.
Outstanding among individual Negro composers of note was James Bland who wrote Carry Me back to Old Virginia and In The Evening by The Moonlight, two songs which have attained a semi-classic niche. Other composers of note are : Harry T. Bur leigh, J. Rosamond Johnson, R. Nathaniel Dett, Will Marion Cook, James W. Johnson (1871-1938), William Grant Still (1895– ) and Clarence Cameron White (188o– ).